Godzilla movies are back - a little too long

Rating: 5/10 (21 December 2013)

The bottom line: a passable remake of "Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla", a camp and fun Japanese production that invented city-bashing monsters fighting giant human-controlled robots. One thing Guillermo del Toro does not understand as well as the Toho gang: under 90 minutes, baby!
Still, with del Toro at the helm, it can't be too bad, and indeed, he delivers expert direction, yet somehow it feels as though he must have been bored while making the film: Perhaps the unnecessary pauses between robot-monster action? The cardboard characters filling said pauses?
The movie borrows liberally from the toolbox of action/horror/sf: We have the well-known actor who gets killed unexpectedly by the monster halfway through the movie (done better in "Deep Blue Sea," and invented by Alfred Hitchcock for "Psycho", and in both of those films it was actually unexpected, but not here). The demure Japanese girl motivated by a strong father figure (straight from "G vs. MG"). We have the rookie who gets no respect, two types of mad scientist, the stern commander whose authority is continually questioned by the hero. Etc, etc. It also is filled with inconsistencies: Let's build a steel-and-concrete wall to hold off monsters that break through skyscrapers as through they were cardboard, and abandon a fairly successful robot defense program. The stern commander realizes a piece of the monster is critical for the mission, but sends a lone chief scientist without ID to pick it up from a dangerous criminal who has government leave to harvest monster pieces. Wait, let's fight the monsters with swords, instead of burying hardened nuclear weapons near the rift and detonating one each time a monster comes out (we did real-life underwater nuke tests for years in the Pacific, and the fallout is much less than having whole cities eaten up). Speaking of swords, the monsters can be sliced into half by a sword, but they can crush through a skyscraper without visible injury, what with all those sharp steel beams poking out. Etc etc.
Now to the good side: for the genre, it is expertly executed, if a little overlong. It delivers almost non-stop anime-style Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla fun, and with all due respect to the Japanese model builders of decades ago, CGI allows better interaction of monster and cityscape. The hero and heroine act together professionally, and only in one line of dialog does the writer/director team break down and go for the superfluous romance angle. The mad scientists are so overacted that it's actually good fun. And Ron Perlman gets a fun cameo, despite his overly obvious declamations before his demise.
The movie does not rise in any way above the limitations of the genre (the way "Deep Blue Sea" did), but it does hold the attention for about 90 minutes of its two hours and goes well with pop corn.